Every business document should be in the cloud and concurrently editable

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I’m at the Melbourne Google Enterprise Atmosphere on Tour event, the first of 25 events around the world. I am doing the keynote on The Evolution of Business at the Melbourne and Sydney events, giving an external perspective which happens to be highly aligned with the Google vision.

The event included a Google Apps demo. Since in my organizations we have used Google Apps for several years the demo initially seemed very straightforward to me, though in fact I did see a number of features that we are not yet using that would be useful.

The demo seemed to be over-emphasizing the concurrent editing and collaboration features of Google Docs, which I think of as pretty basic. However it struck me that in fact the vast majority of organizations represented in the audience still store most of their business documents on a hard disk somewhere. The number of documents being emailed between people inside companies today is still massive.

That is crazy. Emailing documents back and forth is fraught with staggering problems, not least version control.
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The MegaTrend of Distributed Attention is driving everything

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Yesterday I ran Getting Results From Crowds and Crowd Business Models workshops in Sydney, the first in a global series of crowdsourcing workshops.

In opening the Crowd Business Models workshop, I ran through some of the driving forces that are shifting business models to crowds. I had quickly drawn up the list the evening before the workshop, with the first coming to mind Distributed Attention.

During the workshop we had an awesome panel of three of Sydney’s top entrepreneurs: Rebekah Campbell of Posse, Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin of BlueChilli and Phil Morle of Pollenizer.

Each one of them spoke about how much harder it is to get people’s attention than even a year or two ago. For each of them, one of the fundamental reasons that business models need to start with crowds is that individual attention is increasingly fleeting. You can’t bolt on crowds to a business model as an afterthought – it must be at the center.
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Le Crowdsourcing en France: une opportunité de créer le futur

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Je suis enchanté de faire une présentation à Paris 3 mai avec Boostzone Institute. Dominique Turcq de l’institut et moi avons discuté depuis longtemps de notre intérêt commun qui est le futur du travail et des organisations.

Je vais parler du “Crowdsourcing”. Mon nouveau livre Getting Results From Crowds vient de paraître, et en mai-juin je fais des keynote et des ateliers sur le sujet à Sydney, Amsterdam, Cologne, Londres, Bruxelles, New York et San Francisco, entre autres.

Pour moi, un futurologue, c’est quelqu’un qui aide les gens à réfléchir à propos de l’avenir, afin de prendre de meilleures décisions aujourd’hui.

Quand je regarde l’avenir du monde des affaires, il est clair pour moi que le crowdsourcing, ou faire appel aux masses, vont être au centre de comment le business, la société, et les entreprises vont changer.
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Exploring crowd business models

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For me, the most interesting part of my new book Getting Results From Crowds is Chapter 22 on Crowd Business Models (which you can download here). I knew that after getting the book out a major direction for me would be delving deeper into the wonders of crowd business models. I’m now beginning to do some more exploring, together with lots of other people.

Next Monday I run a Crowd Business Models workshop in Sydney, the first in a global series of crowdsourcing workshops.

My Crowd Business Models framework below, like all my frameworks, is in perpetual beta. Part of the intention of the workshop series is that we will collectively evolve my crowdsourcing frameworks, including the one for crowd business models.


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Entrepreneurship becomes global: the top 25 startups hubs in the world

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The Startup Genome project setup a year ago to gather comparative data on startups around the world. Its Startup Compass allows entrepreneurs to compare statistics on their companies with others in their locality and around the world.

A post on Techcrunch provides a great summary of some of the data gathered in the almost 12 months since the launch of the project.

I was particularly interested in the rankings of startup cities around the world, reproduced below. There is no question that the US is no longer the predominant startup country in a world in which economic and entrepreneurial activity is increasingly global.
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Competition! Win free pass to Sydney workshops on how to grow your business using crowdsourcing

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We are kicking off our global series of crowdsourcing workshops on Monday 16 April in Sydney, with a morning workshop on Getting Results From Crowds and an afternoon workshop on Crowd Business Models.

In the following weeks I will be running crowdsourcing workshops in Cologne, London, Paris, Brussels, and New York, followed later in the year by San Francisco and other leading cities.

In the spirit of crowdsourcing, we are offering a free pass to the full day consisting of both workshops in Sydney to the two best answers to the question:

What new opportunities does crowdsourcing create for growing businesses?

You can answer in two ways:
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No reputation measures is the critical flaw in the JOBS crowdfunding bill

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The JOBS crowdfunding Act is a great step forward, but the potential of the entire scheme is undermined by the lack of reputation measures.

This is my first opportunity to write about the historic passing on Thursday of the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act that allows equity crowdfunding in the US.

I have covered the early moves towards equity crowdfunding in the US that resulted in this bill and included a chapter on the topic in Getting Results From Crowds. It is very exciting to see this come to fruition, in the end faster than almost anyone could have predicted.

I believe that this is a critical shift that is taking capitalism into a new phase. The capital markets are – finally – becoming more open, allowing capital to go where it will be best used.
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V&S acquired by Havas: A pivotal moment for crowdsourcing in advertising

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The purchase by Havas of a majority stake in crowdsourced ad agency Victors & Spoils is a sign of a major shift in the advertising industry.

I have written several times before about crowdsourced advertising agency Victors & Spoils. V&S Founder and CEO John Winsor spoke at our Future of Crowdsourcing Summit, and I have since written about some of their lead work with Harley-Davidson and where they have taken that.

The big news today is that global advertising conglomerate Havas has taken a majority stake in V&S, also naming John Winsor as Chief Innovation Officer for the group.
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The growing appetite for learning how to crowdsource

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[Originally posted on Getting Results From Crowds book website]

As awareness of crowdsourcing increases, there is a rapidly increasing appetite for learning how to do it well.

Yesterday I spoke at the City of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business event on Outsourcing: Costs Down + Revenues Up, alongside highly experienced executives such as Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com and Wai Hong Fong, CEO of OzHut.
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Themes of the day: Consumerization of IT, Crowdsourcing for small business, Crowdsourcing in PR

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These are frantically busy days, which is squeezing my ability to blog and capture some of the fascinating stuff flying by. In coming months I think I’ll try to do more ‘mini-blogging’, just capturing quick thoughts and impressions rather than writing up every interesting speaking engagement or media appearance I do.

Yesterday I gave three presentations, and I’d love to write (at least) a full blog post about what we covered for each one. However that’s not possible, so I’ll just share quick thoughts about each topic and what I will try to write more about later.

The day started by giving the keynote at a Consumerization of IT event run by CIO Magazine, supported by HP and Microsoft.
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